Living in Hope and History by Nadine Gordimer Page A

warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cabby. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his mega-novel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what have seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and post-war that contain them. Like all Roth’s work, this phase is wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfilment in the relationship between him and her. But it was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year the next war was preparing in his world, his time; although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and—for me—the summation of his work, with Trotta in a café. On that night ‘My friends’ excitement seemed to me superfluous’—as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history, ‘the moment when the door of the cafe flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on thethreshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters . . . and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.’
    The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he calls to the vanished waiter. ‘Franz, the bill!’ he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over ‘uncanny crosses’ that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the
Kapuzinergruft
, the Emperor’s tomb, ‘where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi’ . . . ‘I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Josef . . . Long live the Emperor!’ The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?’
    I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that he collapsed, for his own death, in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.

AN EXCHANGE: KENZABURO OE,
NADINE GORDIMER

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    4 April 1998
    Dear Miss Gordimer,
    I am reminding myself of the occasion of the visit you paid to Japan coming all the way from South Africa in the autumn of 1992. I took the underground to go and see you at your hotel in central Tokyo. On my way there my train passed the station that was to be the target of the indiscriminate sarin poisoning conducted by the terrorist leaders of the AUM Cult. The AUM incident was to be preceded earlier in the same year by the great earthquake which devastated another big city of Japan. You talk about it in your recent work
The House Gun
as an apocalyptic catastrophe along with the tragic incidents that took place in Bosnia and Somalia.
    Naturally I had no premonition about the catastrophic incidents that were to happen here. But I was somehow sunk deep in melancholy. I was thinking of the modern history of South Africa which you initially experienced in your childhood andcontinually kept on representing in your novels and stories. In the beginning was the colonisation. It was followed by